Pulse
by HatakeKaede-san
Summary: Being the girl without a pulse has its downsides for Clara.


Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who.

 **Pulse**

Clara waved at the bartender and motioned him to pour her yet another glass. As she drowned it, she tried very hard to ignore the instant stare her friend who was sitting on the bar stool next to her with her small feet dangling in the air not quite touching the ground was giving her.

"You know that this will never work, right?" Ashildr asked her at last.

Clara shook her head: "Are you trying to ruin my fun or are you just feeling all grumpy today?"

"Neither. I'm just trying to be your friend."

"Well, a bloody good friend you are with the constant nagging."

Ashildr sighed and decided for a more active course of action as she grabbed the next glass before Clara could drink it: "You realise that in order to get drunk a person actually needs to have blood running through their veins, of course?"

Clara rolled her eyes: "Definitely just being Miss Grumpy Face today then."

Her companion ignored her as she wondered: "You shouldn't even be able to drink anything at all with...how are you even doing that?"

The taller girl gave her a cocky playful smile that didn't quite translate into her voice once she spoke: "Better let's not go there."

Before Ashildr could continue the discussion she was interrupted by a tall handsome young man sitting down on the left side of Clara.

"Well, hello, ladies," he smiled at them suggestively as he checked them out.

"Hello there, yourself," Clara returned the smile, grateful for the interruption to the discussion she most certainly didn't want to have.

"Captain Jack Harkness," the man introduced himself.

"Yes, I know who you are," Ashildr retorted, anger finding its way into her voice. She had been trying to bring up the subject of the discussion for days on no end now. But whenever she did, Clara managed to find a way to brush it off. And now that she got much closer to approaching the heart of the matter, it had to be Captain Jack Harkness out of all people who interrupted her.

"Your friend is a charming one," Jack winked at Clara.

"Funny, that's not what you said the last time we've met," Ashildr barked.

"Oh, so, we've met before? Sorry, it gets a bit hard to keep track. Or perhaps you've already had the pleasure to meet me while I haven't had the pleasure to meet you? Fellow time travellers, eh?"

Before Ashildr could stop her, Clara burted out: "Yeah, something like that. I'm Clara. And the Grinch over here is Ashildr."

The Viking woman shook of the arm Clara put on her shoulder and jumped off the bar stool: "Seeing as this is going nowhere, I'm out of here. But you know what Clara? You really need to stop doing this to yourself."

"I'm not doing anything," the other girl protested.

"Fine," Ashildr sighed in frustration: "just don't come crying to me when it's over and expect me to tell you anything else but 'I told you so'."

Once she realised that Clara wasn't going to dignify her with a response, she turned on her heels and started to walk out of the bar.

"There's room for both of you in my bed, you know!" Jack called after her.

"In your dreams, captain Can't-hold-it-in-my-pants," she threw at him over her shoulder.

* * *

It was somewhat ironic, Clara thought. By all means she shouldn't be able to experience pain. After all, with all of her biological processes being stopped, how could the neurons be sending signals to her brain? But this wasn't really a physical kind of pain, it was something different, a pain caused by what wasn't there. On a purely intellectual level, she understood very well that her frozen body could no more experience pain than it could experience any other physical sensation, be it good or bad. Yet there was no denying that there was pain everlasting squishing at her non-beating heart breaking her apart from the inside.

Yet she did not stop in the vain hope that she might be able to maker herself feel it. She was the impossible girl after all. And she had already made herself breathe and cry real tears, so perhaps making herself feel this wasn't out of the realm of what she was capable of as well?

In the end, it was Jack who broke the whole agony off.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, her voice breaking, knowing fully well what the matter was.

"Yes," Jack breathed out: "you, Clara...you've got no pulse."

"Ahh, that...you know how it is, things like that never come up. Is it a problem for you?" she wondered. She had heard the tales of the famous Captain Jack Harkness before. The man who'd jump at anything with a pulse. Perhaps that left her out of the equation.

"I don't. But I think it might be for you...I'm sorry, Clara, I can't do this for you...to you."

Clara burrowed her head in the pillow and started laughing hysterically.

Jack stared at her as if she had gone completely crazy: "What is it? What's wrong?"

Clara drew in a breath she didn't quite need in between the laughs and gestured at her naked body: "Well, look at me, there was a time when all I had to do was wiggle my finger and I could have had any guy...or girl for that matter...and now I can't even get the most promiscuous guy in all of the universe to sleep with me."

"Oh, I definitely would. I just don't think you'd find it to be a particularly enjoyable experience as things stand right now, love," Jack whispered caressing her face lightly: "I should have known really. The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived. I've heard the stories."

"Which one am I then?"

"Well you're not alive."

"I'm not quite dead either...yet," she whispered.

"It was him, wasn't it?" Jack wondered.

"Who?"

"The Doctor. He made you this."

"I suppose."

"He's a tidal wave. And we're what he leaves behind. Fixed points, paradoxes and zombies."

"We?" Clara asked surprise written over her face.

"Yes, I've also found myself in an impossible situation thanks to the Doctor. He might not have caused it directly, but he started it. That's the way tidal waves work. They crash over us, leave ruins in their wake and we are left to pick up the pieces by ourselves. The thing is I might only be guessing how you feel but I know exactly what you friend is going through. And perhaps she understands what troubles you better thank you might think. You ought to talk to her, Clara," he told her as he kissed her forehead and left her behind.

* * *

"Hi," Clara greeted quietly as she stepped into the TARDIS and found Ashildr bent over a book. The smaller girl was concentrating on reading the ship's manual, after all the years still trying to figure out how to repair the chameleon circuit.

"So, did it help?" she asked over her shoulder.

"No...yes...I don't know."

"You might wanna work on that answer," Ashildr smiled half-heartedly.

"Well, it didn't work if what you're asking...obviously...but it kinda might have helped anyway," Clara tried to explain.

"How so?"

"I might owe you an explanation."

"Oh?"

"I feel like you deserve to know what this was really about."

Ashildr put the book away and finally looked directly at Clara as if to invite her, as if to say 'I'm listening and there will be no I told you so's'.

"There's something I have, but you can't have...you can't just decide to face the raven once you've had enough. Does it bother you?"

"Not right now," Ashildr bowed her head: "but at the same time it's been troubling me for millennia on no end. And I suppose that it will bother me again, eventually."

Neither of them needed to say it out loud, but both knew that the time would come again once Clara's last heart beat ran out.

"There's something you have but I can't," Clara continued.

"And it goes beyond getting drunk and enjoying the other finer pleasures of life, right?"

"I always wanted to have kids and now...," she trails off.

Ashildr nodded in understanding: "I could, you know..."

"Yeah, right, so that you could forget them like you did all the ones before? I'm not putting you through that again."

If Ashildr was relieved by Clara declining her offer she didn't show it before jumping to her next idea: "Well, you could always adopt?"

"And then what? Watch them grow up and wither and die as I stay the same, frozen in time?"

The Viking girl didn't answer.

"He's a tidal wave. And we're what he leaves behind. Fixed points, paradoxes and zombies. That's how tidal waves work, they crash over us and leave ruins in their wake and then we have to pick up the pieces."

"Sorry, what?"

"It's just something Jack said about the Doctor."

Ashildr approached the TARDIS console and set the coordinates: "Astonishing that his one track mind could come up with something that sounds so wise. But he's certainly not wrong. But that's not the whole story. Even being a zombie can have its perks, especially when you have a time machine that also travels in space. We all have bad days, Clara. But for each bad day, there's a good one. And once it starts feeling like the bad days outnumber the good ones, it probably just means that it's time to face the raven. For now, how about alien planets, wanna check some out?"

"Yeah, sure," Clara answered, the smile almost reaching her eyes for the first time in a while. 


End file.
